Current computer technology enables users to access large bodies of audio, video, and textual information. However, streaming media such as audio and video are hard to skim. Thus, it is sometimes very time-consuming to utilize large libraries of video and audio information.
Attempts are being made to remedy this problem. Such attempts have focused primarily on preparing textual transcripts of video and audio archives, and time-correlating such transcripts to the video and audio content. Using this technology, a user can perform a text search using conventional text searching techniques. When sought-for text is found in a transcript, the user can access and play the audio or video associated with the text.
Another technique that can be used in some cases to skim textual materials is to make use of footnoting features in modern word processors such as Microsoft.RTM. Word 97, available from Microsoft Corporation. This word processor can be configured to display the main text of a document in a primary window and the document's footnotes in a secondary, footnote window. A user can move from one footnote to another in the footnote window. Selecting a particular footnote in the footnote window causes the text in the primary window to scroll to the location of the footnote.
While efforts such as these are beneficial, they do not satisfactorily address the problem of finding and reviewing archived video. One problem with the prior art methods is that a person must have some prior idea of the specific video topics being sought. In many situations, however, a person may need simply to skim through multimedia content to determine whether it contains anything of interest. Present multimedia indexing methods do not easily allow this.